Number 4 is awesome! Portland, Reno, and San Diego are all weekend car-trips away (~8 hours 1 way, so 16 hours driving gives about a half a weekend's worth of time for exploring) for two or more people. You can also fly to have more time there, and flights are only about ~$150 round trip on Southwest. Then there's Napa, Monterrey, Lake Tahoe, Yosemite, Muir Woods, Point Reyes, Santa Cruz, Sonoma, and probably more that I'm forgetting as well. And then there's SF, Oakland, and San Jose, which all have events on the weekends, not to mention various things to do and see as well.
Number 7 is pretty great, too. Some are only going to be around until there is an abundance of well qualified software engineers, like free snacks and drinks and ornate gamerooms. But others, like flexible hours are just the nature of this job, so any place that understands how to maximize productivity will allow for this in various degrees.
And I'm just at a post-ipo company that most people haven't heard of, so it's not like i'm looking down from my ivory tower at facebook, apple, google, microsoft, or <trendy startup>.
Number 7 is pretty great, too. Some are only going to be around until there is an abundance of well qualified software engineers, like free snacks and drinks and ornate gamerooms. But others, like flexible hours are just the nature of this job, so any place that understands how to maximize productivity will allow for this in various degrees.
And I'm just at a post-ipo company that most people haven't heard of, so it's not like i'm looking down from my ivory tower at facebook, apple, google, microsoft, or <trendy startup>.